All four engines in the rear gondola seemed to be in fine working order.
He listened to the pitch of their hum. Like any good engineer, his ears told him all that he needed to know. They’re fine. At least that’s something. He then walked back, through the primary guest gondola. Everyone was quiet this time, and he didn’t wait around to hear them voice their complaints again.
No, he thought. He’s not like any one of them.
He then opened the door to the pilot gondola, and asked, “How are we looking, Franck?”
“Good. Nothing’s changed. The slope is increasing, and I’ve raised the angle of our nose by one degree to maintain our rate of ascent.”
“Really? It seems a bit early to do that.” He checked his watch. They had been in the air for just under an hour. “Are you certain?”
Peter could already see the mountain up ahead.
They had apparently made a mistake with their dead reckoning, but, like all fools, Peter decided to continue, lost. He took hold of the large wooden steering wheel again and said, “Okay, I have command. Let’s start our ascent.”
He pulled the lever which changed the angle of the four rear propellers and then tilted the elevators, built into the side of the canopy, so that the angle of the ship increased to eight degrees. It was a little sharper than was normal, but he didn’t want to waste any helium. It might be uncomfortable for some of the passengers who would be unaccustomed to it.
They started to climb.
He watched as his altimeter increased.
Every thousand feet they ascended took them closer to the Magdalena’s ceiling. Soon, they were flying at 3500 feet.
In the distance, the mountain continued to rise ahead of them.
“Where are we, Franck?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, sir. Could it be St Gallons?”
“No, too high for St Gallons.”
Peter calmly got out the book of maps, which contained aerial photographs of the landscapes and mountains. None of them seemed to match the area over which they flew. When he got to the last of the maps, frustrated, he handed the book across to Franck, and said, “Here, see if you can find anything you recognize.”
They were approaching the Magdalena’s maximum ceiling height of 4000 feet, and their altimeter reading kept rising. The mountain ahead of them showed no signs of leveling off.
There was no point in trying to turn the airship around, they just had to keep on going.
Then they attained their final possible height, and the mountain looked as though it was going to go on forever.
“Okay, Franck. I need you to vent some of that helium. It’s the only way; we’ll just have to refill the compartments once we start to descend again.”
“But we’re almost out of helium already.”
“I know that. God damn it, but we don’t have any other choice, do we?”
“No, sir.”
Peter listened as the distinct sound of gas being released by the blow off valves, which were designed to avoid rupturing the hull, were each opened.
And still they climbed.
At 10,000 feet, Peter noticed his dizziness.
It was one of the first signs of hypoxia and he couldn’t ignore it. There simply wasn’t enough oxygen up there to breathe, at that altitude.
He looked at Franck, who was concentrating on taking slow, deep breaths, in order to help his oxygen starved brain continue to function.
“How are you doing there, Franck?”
“I’m all right, but if this mountain is much taller, we’re all going to die of hypoxia long before the Magdalena runs out of helium.” He didn’t sound frightened, he was simply stating the facts.
“Well, that’s one thing going for us, isn’t it?”
Neither of them had the strength or breath to laugh.
“What’s that, straight ahead?” Franck asked.
Peter strained his older eyes to try to just see clearly.
“My God, I think that’s the top of our mountain!”
“Thank God!”
Far up ahead he could see the lights of a town.
“Thank goodness, we made it.” Peter pointed at the lights. “Look at that!”
The lights confirmed that they were finally out of Germany.
“We’re out of Germany, but where?”
“I have no idea.”
Peter’s dizziness subsided as they made their descent, but his headache seemed to hang on.
The slope was riddled with rocky ledges, snow, and enormous pine trees. Peter was worried about where they might safely land the Magdalena when they ran out of helium, and drew blank on a solution.
“We’re out of helium,” Franck reminded him, as his worst fear was realized.
“Okay, we can do this. We’ll have to adjust for it by increasing our angle of attack and the RPMs of our fine Daimler-Benz.”
Peter did just that, but the Magdalena seemed to keep falling.
He watched, as the altimeter dropped at the rate of 200 feet per minute.
“Okay, Franck, we’re going to need to lose some of our weight, or we’re going hit the ground pretty hard.”
“Copy that. I’ve already dumped our water ballast and our air. What else do we have?”
“Franck, I want you to go back to the passenger’s gondola and see what else we can dump from there. You’d better let them know we’re going down, too. Throw out their precious cargo, if you have to.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
“And Franck, don’t take too long. We’re going to need to find somewhere to put her down soon, and I’m going to need your help.”
Professor Fritz Ribbentrop watched as the engineer opened the door from the open air gangway. There was nothing casual about his movements.
“Quick, we’ve run out of helium and we’re losing altitude fast. I need everyone to help me throw out anything that isn’t bolted down.”
He noticed that the men seemed to comprehend what he was asking much faster than did either of the women or young children, who simply stared blankly back at him, as though he’d just issued a completely mad order for them to jump out of the airship.
“Should we dump the alcohol?” asked one of the older gentlemen, who was holding his wife’s hand, and whose face seemed to maintain a perpetual scowl.
“Yes, that would help very much.”
Himself, the two other men who appeared to be in their fifties, and the engineer, all quickly got to work throwing the expensive wines and other spirits off the ship. It almost made him laugh to think that he was destroying more valuable liquor than he would ever have had sufficient funds to consume under normal circumstances.
The side tables were the next to go overboard.
“You’re going to need to help me with this. It’s too heavy,” he said to the man next to him, as he tipped the refrigerator.
“Okay, but how are we going to get it through the door?”
He took large book that was on the shelf used it to strike the large glass window in front of him. As it shattered, and the glass pieces fell to the ground far below, he said, “We can push it straight out here.”
It took a little bit of rocking, but they soon had the thing tipped over the side.
The bookshelf went next.
Soon, the formerly luxurious gondola was reduced to eleven chairs, its occupants, and their personal effects.
The engineer, who had come from the pilot house looked at the large, ornate altimeter that was situated in the middle of the gondola, just as an old grandfather clock would be placed aboard a luxury steamship. The arm still rotated clockwise, indicating that they were losing altitude.